


Angel Investor

by karanguni



Series: GNU Terry Pratchett [2]
Category: Discworld - Terry Pratchett, The Culture - Iain M. Banks
Genre: Alternate Universe - Real World, Crossover, Gen, Special Circumstances (The Culture Series), The Culture Citizen Known As Elon Musk, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-24
Updated: 2020-12-24
Packaged: 2021-03-11 04:53:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,029
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28299261
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/karanguni/pseuds/karanguni
Summary: 'You look like shit,' Zakalwe informed him. 'Not so easy, is it, dragging humanity kicking and screaming towards enlightenment?'
Series: GNU Terry Pratchett [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2090163
Comments: 10
Kudos: 22
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	Angel Investor

**Author's Note:**

  * For [hangingfire](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hangingfire/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide! I took your Special Circumstances + Earth in 2020 + crossover prompt and rode that pony all around the park... :D
> 
> Set after [this fic in the same crossover verse](https://archiveofourown.org/works/21801640).

Cheradenine Zakalwe – one of many Cheradenine Zakalwes that have been and always will be – thumped into the room. He pushed the cloak he was wearing over one shoulder, took his place at the wooden table, and looked at the other Cheradenine Zakalwe seated across from him.

'These cloaks are scratchy and this city stinks,' he said.

'You get used to it,' the other one of him replied.

Zakalwe tipped his chin at badge his counterpart was wearing. 'Very shiny. What's your rank?'

'Lieutenant of the Watch,' said the other Zakalwe. 'The Commander thinks I wouldn't make a good captain, and he's probably right.'

'Yeah, probably,' agreed Zakalwe with a drawl. There was police work on the scale that he was used to – to wit, planetary – and then police work on the scale that this Eccentric Peace Faction version of himself was used to, and they weren't anywhere close to the same thing. Zakalwe of the Watch wasn't allowed to shoot people in the head, for one thing.

Still.

'Is it true you haven't even got guns?' Zakalwe asked, fascinated despite himself. For all the lives he'd lived, there hadn't been many where the Culture hadn't put a gun in his hands to start with.

Lieutenant Zakalwe swigged a mouthful from the tankard in front of him and wiped his lips with the back of his hand. 'Who needs _guns_ when you've got this?' He hefted something up from beside his chair and laid it out on the table. It was... a crossbow.

'That's a crossbow,' Zakalwe pointed out helpfully.

' _This_ is a Burleigh and Stronginthearm crossbow,' Lieutenant Zakalwe corrected, stroking a hand over it with an easily recognisable fondness. 'You can't ask for much better, hereabouts.'

'Big fish, small pond,' muttered Zakalwe.

'Everything's relative,' Lieutenant Zakalwe smiled, smug, and toasted him with the tankard. 'Retirement's good. You should try it sometime.'

Zakalwe rolled his eyes. 'If you're so retired, what are you doing listening in on a mission brief?'

'Enjoying how much I've left it all behind,' Lieutenant Zakalwe grinned.

'Ook ook,' said the third member of their cabal, interrupting their mutual masturbation.

Zakalwe nodded at the three hundred pound orang-utan, whom he'd come to know was not worth pissing off. 'Yeah, yeah, to business. What have you got for me, then?'

'Ook,' the Librarian said, and gestured with a long-limbed arm towards the last attendee. It was a drone. 'Oooook ook ook.'

'Look, I'm a man of many talents, but I still don't quite speak Chimpanese,' Zakalwe grumbled. Their host, the General Nonsense Unit _Man In The Funny Black Hat_ , was very committed to maintaining the mechanics of its internal Discworld, which made it straight hell to work with on the rare occasion that anyone in the Culture needed to.

' _Ook,_ ' thundered the very-much-not-a-chimpanzee threateningly.

'Great Ape-ese,' corrected Zakalwe instantly. 'Will one of you just throw me a bone? I don't do Lost and Found all that often, and it's pretty damned rude to make me work with Mr. Let Me Die In Peace While Waving A Crossbow About spectating, so could we cut to the chase?'

'What our friend the Librarian is saying,' said the sole drone at the table smoothly, 'is that we're missing a library book. That, of course, is a metaphor.'

Zakalwe leaned back in his chair and regarded the shitty tavern room they were in, with its creaking floorboards and the candelabra with its many candles swaying gently overhead that threatened to drip tallow on them at any moment. 'A metaphor? _No._ '

Lieutenant Zakalwe took another drink, and burped.

Zakalwe sighed. He looked at the drone. 'Who are you, again?'

'I am the GCU _Grey Area_ ,' said the ship's avatar. 'You could say I specialise in these sorts of cases.'

'Oh boy,' whistled Zakalwe. 'The _Meatfucker._ Someone's really in for it now...'

* * *

'I would prefer not to displace you into position,' the _Grey Area_ said when they arrived at the volume where the mission was to be conducted.

Zakalwe, legs propped up on a table, looked up at a screen that had a view of the planet below. 'I don't know, ship,' he said. 'They've got a lot of junk in orbit.'

There were satellites in various states of orbital decay; bits of beyond-medieval rockets that the planet's inhabitants, in their infinite wisdom, had decided to just shunt off into space; general flotsam composed of plastic, nuts and bolts... Pity. It was a nice blue planet otherwise.

'I won't have any difficulty, not with their level of technology,' the _Grey Area_ said.

Zakalwe stood upright and dusted himself down. 'I'm backed up in more places than even _I_ know, ship. Displacing doesn't bother me.'

'It bothers _me_.'

Zakalwe took one final look at the screen. 'Fine. Have it your way.'

'The module will have your wardrobe,' the _Grey Area_ said, opening up the doors of the lift tube on the other end of the room.

'Wonderful,' Zakalwe said, looking heavenward. 'My favourite part. Do I get anything fun to take with me?'

'No guns, Mr. Zakalwe,' the _Grey Area_ said. 'That would be terribly vulgar.'

'Have you _read_ the statistics about the place you're dumping me in, ship?' Zakalwe asked, incredulous. ' _Everyone_ has a gun.'

'Factually untrue,' said the _Grey Area_ pedantically.

'Well, they've got enough to go around, let me tell you,' Zakalwe muttered.

'Policemen don't need guns,' the _Grey Area_ informed him, so dry that it had to be joking. 'Not our kind of policemen, anyway.'

'Excuse _you_. I'm purely here on lost and found duty.'

Zakalwe got into the lift tube, which zipped him quickly over to the module. Stepping inside, he reviewed the outfits hung up in the module's wardrobe: a simply cut suit in the fashion of the region of the planet he was headed to, then something clearly more casual – black denim pants, a black cotton shirt with some graphic design on it, and a leather jacket with attractively moulded elbow patches.

'These two outfits aren't anything alike, ship,' Zakalwe pointed out. 'Am I supposed to be a rich corporate sort or a bit of a fuckwad?'

'Both,' the _Grey Area_ told him. 'Because the two outfits are equal in price.'

Zakalwe shrugged, and went for the black on black on black. 'Didn't we recruit someone from here a while back?' he asked, never quite sure how all of Special Circumstance's recruits turned out in the end. That was more Sma's thing, or had been, anyway. She'd retired... how many years ago now? Decades? Centuries? It was hard to keep track of time.

'You were involved in the recruitment of two individuals from Earth some time ago,' the _Grey Area_ confirmed. 'One remains in service, being particularly good at technological transfer.'

'Desk job,' Zakalwe translated, stripping out of his shirt. He glanced briefly in the mirrorfield next to the wardrobe; no scars on this body. Too new. 'And the other?'

'He suffered what I believe your section of Contact terms "burn out." His handler thought he had the potential to become something like you, but he turned out less adaptable in the end.'

Zakalwe combed his hair back out of his face and tied it up. 'Couldn't wrap his head around all of your Culture modifications?'

'No,' the _Grey Area_ said, sounding contemplative. 'I believe the final report said that he "needed a more obvious bad guy to fight."'

Zakalwe put his head back and laughed. 'You should've told him to look in the mirror,' he said. 'That's all the enemy you people ever need – you wouldn't be sending me in to mop up your messes otherwise.'

The ship did not reply directly. Instead it said, 'There is a case inside the wardrobe. Please take it with you in lieu of something that goes _bang._ '

Zakalwe retrieved the sleek little case and opened it. He looked at what was inside, then shook his head. 'Come on, ship,' he said, sliding it inside of his jacket pocket. 'I'm ready. Let's go.'

* * *

The module popped him down onto the grounds of a grand house somewhere with very temperate weather. It was called, in the local vernacular, the City of Angels. Zakalwe, whose idle research during the trip to Earth had involved looking up the many ways this early-stage civilisation was still shooting itself repeatedly in the foot, had surmised that it was probably easier for the locals to believe in celestial beings than in each other. He couldn't blame them.

It wasn't hard to waltz his way into the house. Everything looked sophisticated, but there wasn't much real substance to the security systems, and with the _Grey Area_ 's help Zakalwe was upstairs and in the man's bedroom without any trouble.

He sat on the man's bed, which was very nice, and look around the rest of the room, which was also very nice. It was all, per the paperwork, rented.

According to newspaper reports, this was the man's idea of what _owning no homes_ and having _no physical possessions_ looked like: renting opulently. He was more than capable of owning as many houses as he liked, being very rich; he had in fact owned quite a few before making the flash declaration that he wouldn't be tied down by material things and then selling them all off. It was almost as if he was compensating for something.

The only man richer than one who owned everything, in Zakalwe's opinion, was the man who didn't have anything at all. There were, admittedly, nuances to that statement. There was the spiritual angle; plenty of religious types reached a sort of transcendental, Sublimer-style perma-euphoria by having very few things to tie them down to the Real. But Zakalwe didn't think it was the case here: this was much more the Culture's sort of minimalism, a minimalism that only those with maximal power to go from Zero to One Hundred Billion at the drop of a hat could advocate. Culture citizens tended not to ask their local Minds for personal palaces because they didn't _need_ them. Culture folk didn't hoard wealth like dragons because they had all the damned wealth in the universe at their disposal, materially speaking. What was the point?

The Culture, being do-gooders, were always looking to spread Peace and Joy and Goodness across the galaxy so that everyone else could see it their way. Zakalwe had done his own calculus on this matter an aeon or two ago and decided better them than any of the other Involveds, and – for the most part – he hadn't looked back. The parts of him that _had_ decided it wasn't worth it, well. Not many people got to have their conscience defect and fuck off to go live, quite literally, elsewhere, but that was the Culture for you. They'd accommodate you until you fell on your own sword. S.C. loved him for it as much as it hated him for the same reasons.

Hypocritically, the Culture didn't like using its own citizens for Special Circumstances field work because they tended to go a little ga-ga with all that Perspective you got living outside of the bubble. When they did send Culture natives out into the world, it was mostly for technological transfer and feel-good anthropological studies. Something slow and steady, with less bombs and war and revolution. Normal Contact stuff. That was what was supposed to happen with young civilisations like Earth: they'd send a good, bookish Culture person to mingle with the locals and see if it was worth nudging them along.

Then there was what they said about the best laid plans of mice and Minds, and all that.

There hadn't been an _official_ Contact agent sent to Earth, not since the last one a half-century or so ago, because the previous Committee of know-it-all Minds had determined Earth wasn't ready to tear back the galactic veil. But some amateur tourist had somehow landed himself here for a sightseeing trip to goggle at the primitives, and the rest was now Earth History. Contact was very miffed that a mere human had somehow slipped out from under them to go Do Good on their own, and so here Zakalwe was: lost and found duty.

The door of the bedroom opened, and the man walked in.

'Hello, Mr. Musk,' Zakalwe said, waving. He spoke in Marain.

The man stopped short, but didn't shout for help or scream. He just closed the door behind him. The locking mechanism clicked, and then the man turned again and looked at Zakalwe. His eyes were a little bloodshot; all that saviour complexity messing up his drug glands, Zakalwe supposed.

'You look like shit,' Zakalwe informed him. 'Not so easy, is it, dragging humanity kicking and screaming towards enlightenment?'

'You're Special Circumstances?' the man known on Earth as Mr. Musk asked, also in Marain.

'Yeah,' Zakalwe said, raising up both his hands. 'I come in peace, I think I'm supposed to say. _They_ –' he pointed vaguely upwards '– aren't all that happy with you, what with you disrupting local governments with your so-called crazy plans for space travel and colonising Mars and whatnot. Did you think they'd put all their cards down if you could just get this lot puddlejumping one or two planets? Swoop in and give everyone citizenship for trying so hard to learn how to fly?'

'I'd hoped,' said the man, settling into a chair and looking _tired._ 'We could change things, if we wanted to. All this planet has to do is find out there's more _out there_ , and then maybe they'll stop fighting themselves to death.'

'How's that working out for you?' Zakalwe asked, dry.

The man didn't say anything.

'Here's a tip,' Zakalwe said, catching the man's eye and forcing him to hold his gaze. 'The Culture only likes helping people when their worthiness is measured in gigadeaths and "giga-lifes," let's just call it. You lot don't have a name for that, did you ever notice? A word for the number of lives you change at the drop of a hat, as opposed to the number you snuff out. In any case, a few billion doesn't count for much in their grand scheme, and they'd like you to come home, pretty please, instead of using the shit you learned in primary school or whatever they call it to build electric groundcars and shitty space ships.'

The man was still silent, but he'd brought a hand up to his face and was covering his eyes.

'If it makes you feel any better,' Zakalwe told him, a little less acerbically, 'I've done what you're trying to do before. I did it _better_ , but it turned out the same way. You can't _make_ people the Culture before they're ready for it. You can't _fix_ people with technology unless the beggars have the same access to it as the kings.'

'That's what I was trying to _do,_ ' snapped the man at last.

'You can't do it alone,' Zakalwe shrugged. 'And, in the Culture? You can't do it without _permission._ Sorry. Humans are just foot soldiers in the Culture's war, and it's the Minds that get to choose the battles. So. Are you going to tell me how you got here without a ship? How about how much tech you've transferred over?'

'What are you going to do if I don't?' the man asked, raising his eyebrows. 'I'm a citizen of the Culture; you can't _make_ me tell you anything. I didn't break any rules – none were written down!'

'Ha,' Zakalwe said with a short laugh. 'Nice to see some of you still think this way.'

He lifted his hand, and a small knife missile shot out of his sleeve. The man slumped forward a moment later, unconscious but still very much alive.

Zakalwe reached into his jacket pocket and removed the slim case that the _Grey Area_ had given him. 'And they say _I'm_ the bad guy,' he muttered as he removed the small, snake-shaped device. It shimmered in his hand for a moment, then began to move. Zakalwe hauled the Culture man upright and placed the neural lace down on his shoulder. It slithered up along his neck and into his left nostril, then disappeared completely. The man jerked once, then settled.

Zakalwe hefted the man over his shoulder, and then stepped out of the second floor window and into the invisible module, which took them back up to the _Grey Area._

* * *

This time around, Zakalwe ordered himself a beer before settling down at the table.

'Still enjoying the job?' Lieutenant Zakalwe the Watchman asked him. It was mocking; the man was frowning and looked pretty pissed off.

'I'm just a mercenary,' Zakalwe shrugged. 'They point, I punch.' He drank from his tankard.

'Ook ook,' the Librarian said. It looked satisfied, if a little subdued; if Zakalwe were a zoologist, he'd call the expression on the orang-utan's face maybe even a little sad.

'I am done with my investigations,' the _Grey Area_ reported via its drone. 'I am satisfied; the man is free to go.'

'Great,' said Zakalwe. 'Hope he's going to enjoy spending a long time with a slap drone.' Now _that_ , in Zakalwe's opinion, was cruel and unusual and therefore a very Culture punishment, in the sense that they insisted it was no punishment at all to have your privacy infringed all the time and what you could and could not do dictated to you.

'Oooook,' the Librarian said, cheering up a little.

'He says,' Lieutenant Zakalwe translated, a beatific look lightening his previously dark expression, 'the _Man In The Funny Black Hat_ has a counterproposal for Contact.'

'A counterproposal?' asked the _Grey Area_ , sounding sceptical.

'Oooooooooook,' said the Librarian, looming very convincingly.

* * *

The Culture citizen previously known as Elon Musk gasped as he came to. He was sitting in a comfortable chair. Though he did not know it yet, he was in the Patrician's Palace in Ankh-Morpork. There was a man sitting at a desk opposite him. He was very thin, dressed in black robes, and had his fingers steepled together.

'Shall I tell you about angels, Mr. Musk?' asked Lord Havelock Vetinari, pleasantly. 'I know two interesting facts about them...'


End file.
